Thanks for this great gallery of views of views reflected in (illusion of) glass on two-dimensional plane. Take a look at the chapter on the two closet scenes in Reading the Unseen (which talks about Giovanni Arnolfini and his Bride. Meanwhile, another 'reflection' way out here. . . .

Curtis, many thanks, as ever, for the good eye. Especially grateful this time round, given the circumstances.

Time, that implacable Exterminating Angel whose outlines have been so strikingly delineated in recent posts by Julia at Meliora Latent, has haunted these image searches...

Julia, the link to your Belgrano post is a gift to us. Here's what I said to you over there:

"This is beautiful, and dizzying.

"A mirror-within-a-mirror-within-a-lens: the experience of dislocation or vertigo in such an image reminds us that one cannot 'hold a mirror up to nature' without also holding a mirror up to the mirror, and then another... and then accepting all the cracks in the several mirrors, which after all are merely 'perfect' (that is, perfectly limited) multipliers of what is, to begin with, a multiply fractured 'reality'..."

And speaking of Time's Exterminating Angel, that charmer turns up again in the penultimate painting on this present post -- the Time and The Old Women of Goya. (Something tells me Goya could never be considered a "vanity painter".)

(Thinking about shattered glass, apropos your second link, Artemisia, perhaps you know a painting by Jean-Baptiste Greuze in the Wallace Collection, London: The Broken Mirror, 1763?)

The use of mirrors in painting is of course a delicate and subtle trick painters have long employed to indicate something is there without actually pointing to it.

What is not directly shown is sometimes more important than what is immediately seen -- and, too, the trouble one takes in finding out that this is the case provides an exercise for the powers of attention, and such exercise, in turn, may itself comprise the ultimate pleasure in viewing.

On this subject we are fortunate to have a resident expert. Here is a passage from Stephen's book on the "offstage action" in Hamlet -- Steve is referring to the van Eyck Arnolfini Portrait, and the enlarged detail from it which can be seen as the seventh image in this present post.

"To begin with a portrait painted by Jan van Eyck one hundred fifty years before the time of Hamlet: Giovanni Arnolfini and His Bride shows, according to H. W. Janson, '[t]he young couple... solemnly exchanging marriage vows in the privacy of the bridal chamber.' There appears to be no one else present in the room, but, as Janson points out, reflected in a small round mirror 'conspicuously placed behind them' on the wall is the image of two other figures, one of whom must be the artist, since the words 'Joannes de eyck fuit hic' (Jan van Eyck was here) is written 'in florid legal lettering' above the date, 1434. The painter is a witness to this marriage ceremony, his painting a kind of 'pictorial marriage certificate'..."

Of course the Velázquez was one of the works I first considered in doing this post.

The issue of whether that framed object on the wall in the background of the painting is in fact a mirror, or perhaps a painting (of Philip and his wife), or whether, possibly, the whole scene before us is to be "read" as a reflection in a mirror -- this is, as you put it so well, a "multi-faceted entendre" of the first order.

As it happens, I have reserved that painting for a separate post, which may perhaps some day follow (touch wood).

Artemisia, at your request I am removing the sonnet quoted in your comment. But as the remainder of your comment contributed substantially to the thoughts that have been developing here, I hope you won't mind my retaining that here:

"The Jean-Baptiste Greuze painting is provocative and beautiful.Thank you for calling my attention to it! You must be familiar with this remarkable painting by Velasquez with its uncanny use of ‘reflection,’ and the mirror as multi faceted entendre.